I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media to replace that loss, online. /1

I hate social media used in that way. It’s not popular to point out that friendship is mostly an adolescent stage of life, there as a first taste of dealing with an other outside a family group. You’re supposed to grow out of the need for it. /2

Of course you will always have friends, and enjoy having them. But you lose the *need* for them that teenagers have. They’re people to have fun with, to discuss things with and do things with. But emotionally, you shouldn’t need them. /3

The famous Orson Welles quote: “We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.” People quote that a lot, but you don’t see much thought about what it actually means. /4

Social media would collapse if there was thought about it. That clinging co-dependency of team sports you see on here, around every issue, where the actual facts and details are just banners different groups march under, in battle with other groups. /5

My Tweets about societies as high schools are all about that. How every part of adult life is now infected with the same adolescent culture that we all learn in high school. Our politics is pure high school, dressed up in drag names like capitalism, Left, Right etc. /6

Watch it here, every day, people can’t resist refracting all of our shared problems through the lens of what ‘Albo’ or ‘Dutton’ is doing. Like it actually matters what any popularly-elected person thinks or does about anything. Who the fuck cares. /7

If you think it matters because they ‘have power’, spend more time questioning why they do? How popularity became the doorway to world domination. Popularity is the currency of high school. We never left. Given the choice between understanding something, and mobilising…/8

…the team to go into battle against other teams, actual understanding is never going to win in high school societies. You might lose friends! You’ll betray the team! What Welles’ quote means I think is that you should of course love and socialise, but as you. Always as you. /9

Not as part of any team, even of two. No co-dependency. No desperate need to be liked or even recognised. DH Lawrence once said our entire lives are a journey to find out just who we are, individually. It takes mighty effort to strip away the co-dependency of social life. /10

We won’t beat Covid for the same reason we won’t beat climate change. The ‘economy’ is just a mega-machine of high school psychology. People aren’t selfish, quite the opposite, that’s always been the worst explanation of economic politics. /11

They’re incapable of breaking free of sociality. If they were genuinely selfish, looking out for their true selves, we might have a hope. What’s best for any of us individually is also what’s best for the group. The libertarian fantasies of free individuals? /12

Another banner another team marches under. Deeply, fanatically social and collective. Despite what it says. The libertarians on here stick to each other like dog shit to your shoe, they’re utterly incapable of any independent thought or action. /13

The lethal genius of ‘the economy’ as an invention is that it’s an engine of eternal adolescence. Again, it’s not a mechanism to individualise everything, it’s the exact opposite. It’s the framework that allows the team sports of high school to never end. /14

Every custom and tradition, every bit of knowledge earned through centuries of human suffering, can be cast aside if it can be made unpopular. Or something else trivial can be made more popular. Popularity, popularity, popularity. It’s all that’s left. Fads and fashions. /15

It’s why ‘economic growth’ goes up and down like a yo-yo, as fashion does. Driven by huge waves of popularity, ever-shifting in their focus. All those laughable ‘objective’ graphs showing the economy at work, as if there’s some stable underlying mechanism to it all. /16

Nobody asks why economies never stabilise, why they always boom and bust. It’s because they don’t exist, it’s just social life, unbridled high school popularity contests. Social media dramatically accelerates this shift. We know how to solve most of our problems. /17

We don’t solve them because all of it is only fodder for these eternal high school social games of building popularity, teams and hierarchies, status. Question a member of an expert group on here, for example, and watch the rest of them suddenly appear. Backing the team. /18

Even the most serious-looking expert groups are really part of the same social games. We see accounts on here set up by senior experts, purely to throw shit at OzSAGE. Social media again is entrenching this behaviour, we’re becoming blind to just how ridiculous it all is. /19

I like Spinoza. He always backed in knowledge as the only solution to our problems. Not mobilising people politically, that’s just more social status games. More team sports. Understanding is all that changes the world. Not always fast. But everything else is high school. /end